Technical Field
The invention relates to providing recommendations. More particularly, the invention relates to providing recommendations based on the user's intent and the similarity of the user's preferences to those of other users.
Description of the Background Art
Websites, such as e-commerce sites and other interactive systems, usually include recommendation systems to provide personalized recommendations with regard to items that are available in their inventory. Such recommendation systems are based on tracking user activities or behavior and, in some cases, based on the users' explicit rating of products.
Existing recommendation systems provide recommendations based on the nature of what a user has seen or rated and/or the behavior exhibited by similar users who exhibit similar behavioral patterns. There are also recommendation systems that implement product-to-product mapping, which considers the similarity of products to historically browsed products and the present product.
Unfortunately, such systems often fail to provide useful recommendations, and often provide erroneous recommendations, which can frustrate or annoy the user.